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'Corrugated World' at Cameron Art Museum

Artist's cardboard creations are like nothing you've ever seen

James Grashow's "The Great Monkey Project 2006" is part of his "Corrugated World" exhibition at the Cameron Art Museum. Photo courtesy of the Cameron Art Museum

By Justin LacyStarNews Correspondent

Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 at 8:59 a.m.

Last Modified: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 at 8:59 a.m.

The steady pulse of "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Mack the Knife" and other jazz standards lightly sends three couples twirling, weaving and gliding throughout the vast, white, negative space of the Cameron Art Museum. These dancers are tall – my guess would be 15 feet for the men – they are cardboard, and man, they really move.

Facts

What: Community Art Day and the“Corrugated World: The Artwork of JamesGrashow” exhibition at the Cameron ArtMuseumWhen: Community Art Day is noon-4p.m. Saturday, March 15. “CorrugatedWorld” hangs through Aug. 3. Museumhours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdaythrough Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.Thursdays.Where: The Cameron Art Museum,3201 S. 17th St., Wilmington.Tickets: Admission to Community ArtDay is by donation. General museumadmission is $8, $5 for seniors, militaryand students, and $3 for children ages2 to 12.Details: 395-5999 or www.CameronArtMuseum.org

Brooklyn-born artist James Grashow's "Corrugated Dancers" tiptoe and pivot on dollies viewers can roll around. The paper-light, shipping-box-brown cardboard romantics are Grashow's first fully interactive installation, and they're making their debut in "Corrugated World: The Artwork of James Grashow," on display through Aug. 3 at Wilmington's Cameron Art Museum. The show features a decade of Grashow's cardboard sculpture and woodcut prints, as well as "Corrugated Flower Pot," a whimsical, larger-than-life community art project in which the public can contribute their own corrugated additions – made with Grashow – at the CAM's Community Art Day, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday.

For Grashow, cardboard is an accessible medium that can unleash anyone's pent-up childhood creativity.

"Cardboard ignites the artist in everyone," Grashow says in the "Corrugated World" program. "If you go into a kindergarten class and ask who is an artist, everyone raises their hand. If you go back a few years later and ask who is an artist, everyone points at one or two kids."

Grashow has maintained his own childlike creativity during a prolific career spanning nearly five decades. Born in Brooklyn in 1942, he has devoted many of his 72 years to completing insanely arduous art projects, either grandiose in scale or minute in their intricacy. It took Grashow more than three years to piece together tiny segments of cardboard, twist ties and acrylic paint into colorful and absurdly detailed life-sized scenes of nature in his "Cardbird Series," displayed in the CAM adjacent to the overgrown "Corrugated Dancers."

By contrast, for his first three-dimensional exhibition in New York in 1966, Grashow transformed the Allen Stone Gallery into a forest of 15-foot paper mache figures his audience could transverse through. Grashow described laboring over the colossal characters during a lecture at the public opening of "Corrugated World" on March 8.

"I remember sitting on a ladder when I was working on these figures," Grashow said, "putting my threads in the eyeballs of these 15-foot-high paper mache figures, and I thought, 'Man, this is great. This is the essence of what being an artist is: doing unbelievably stupid things.'"

From the beginning, Grashow has strived to create an experience for his viewers akin to stepping into a painting by corrugating cardboard into sculptures that incorporate the space of a room.

"The essence of everything was how it involves space," Grashow said. "When you look at a painting, you're not looking at whether the eyes follow you around the room, you look at how the piece extends to space. For me, the essential core of what I'm looking for and what I believe in is that oneness. You look for that oneness in everything. Sometimes the work looks almost trivial and cartoonish, but it's always a quest for that oneness."

For Grashow, no work does a better job of adhering that oneness than the "Great Monkey Project." Eighty-five cardboard monkeys hang, swing and dive from the ceiling of the CAM. For something static, the river of simians has so much momentum that you can almost hear their primal, boisterous cacophony as they rush for the door. The monkeys are only the departure point, however. Moving around and beneath their dangling feet and curlicue tails, the space between the monkeys and their shadows swirl into a three-dimensional abstract composition of shape and line.

"What happens that was so intriguing about the monkeys, almost more than anything else, is that the space between them started to articulate in a way that was so beautiful. It spoke to the essence of abstraction," Grashow said. "At one level there were the monkeys, they spoke to that entry point to bring everybody in, but at the second level, and the most important level, they spoke about the harmony of space, the weave of negative and positive space."

At some point there's a third level in which you see the monkeys for what they are: assemblages of cardboard. You realize how fragile and light they must be, and you wonder how they made it down from Redding, Conn., where the artist resides with his wife, in one piece. In one minute, you're amused by the animated fun of the troop, in the next you're enveloped by their chaotic, fragmented distortion of space. Finally, you're concerned with their mortality, or rather the mortality of the material.

"The fun masks a great, great darkness," Grashow said. "They say the essence of an artist isn't what he makes … The essence of an artist is the materials that he's drawn to. So an artist who works in steel, or an artist who works in metal, is an unbelievably different artist than an artist who works in paper and cardboard. The essence of building with cardboard is it portrays a feeling of fragility and mortality that probably is my own personal terror about life and death."

In 2006, Grashow wanted to address the entire creative process, not from beginning to finish, but from beginning to end. He spent several years building "Corrugated Fountain."

"It was something that aspired to be heroic, to be eternal, but at its core, a cardboard fountain can't exist," Grashow said.

After exhibiting it in several venues, Grashow installed the "Corrugated Fountain" outside at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield. Paper covers rock, and scissors sure cut paper, but water obliterates cardboard.

The creation and destruction of Grashow's "Corrugated Fountain" is documented in "The Cardboard Bernini," which will screen at the CAM 3 p.m. May 4.

Features: 343-2343

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